


Entanglements

by astolat



Series: Thor works [15]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Also Saving The World, Blowing Up Planets, Compensatory Incest Porn Of The Gods, F/M, Incest, It Kind Of Goes On From There, Knotting, Loki Joins the Avengers, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Multi, Orgasm Denial, Sex Pollen, That's The Kinks Through The First Scene, The Mighty Frog Thor, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 22:12:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Huh, was Tony's first thought when the spell broke and all of a sudden his brain came back online.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entanglements

**Author's Note:**

> With many many thanks to Cesperanza for beta. :D

Huh, was Tony's first thought when the spell broke and all of a sudden his brain came back online. He rolled his eyes up from the cock in his mouth -- very nice, uncut, just the right size to suck for a while -- and found Bruce staring down at him.

"I'm just going to," Bruce said after a moment, then slid out and unstraddled his chest, which let Tony see that yes, that was indeed Captain America's cock up his ass. Steve was still in most of his uniform, wearing an expression vaguely like someone had just shot a kitten in front of him. Possibly a kitten painted in the stars and stripes. "Oh my God," he said.

Tony reacted just in time and locked his legs around Steve's hips. "No!" he said. Steve gawked at him. "No yanking!" Tony said. "Yanking is extremely bad. Slow, gentle withdrawal."

"I -- " Steve said, faintly, and then he swallowed and nodded and pulled carefully out. And out. And out. Wow. Tony craned his head up long enough to get a full view, for later mental re-enactment purposes, and then let himself flop back onto the grass.

"Where are we?" he said, staring up. There was a tree overhead. "Are we still in the city?"

"Somewhere in Central Park?" Bruce said.

"Sheep Meadow," Steve said. He still sounded dazed.

"Well, that's on YouTube then," Tony said. It was always nice when the Internet relieved him of the boring hassle of cover ups. "What happened to everyone else? Where's my suit?"

"It's here, it's folded up," Bruce said. Tony found that feature handy on several occasions before, if not previously one just like this. He made a mental note to stock the suit with condoms and a toothbrush. "Clint and Natasha are, uh, over by the next tree."

"Really?" Tony said, debating whether he had the energy to sit up for that. Regretfully he didn't think so. His body was checking in with more detailed reports at this point, and he was becoming fairly sure that this hadn't been the first round of festivities. Amora was going to get two repulsors to the head next time he saw her: he couldn't remember a damn thing.

"Are you okay?" Bruce said.

"Yeah," Tony said, waving a hand. "Pepper gives me a get-out-of-the-doghouse-free card every time I save the world and I'm up to three, so even if she gets picky and counts this as two, I'm still in the clear."

He managed to crane his head up enough to see that Natasha was already dressed and Clint was zipping his pants up, nothing more to see over there. She was giving him a friendly kiss on the cheek thank-you. Well, that was boring. Tony let his head fall back again. "I feel very strongly that at least one of you should bring me a drink and a towel," he added. "Possibly a cigarette." He nudged Steve with a foot. "You. You're supposed to be a gentleman."

"I just had sex for the first time," Steve said dazedly. "With _you_."

"Congratulations," Tony said, editing his natural first reaction -- "Victory is mine!" -- as that was probably insensitive enough to eat up his third doghouse card if someone was filming, which actually raised the question, why weren't there cameras in his face and why did it sound like the news helicopters were somewhere in the distance?

Making a significant effort, he pushed himself up onto his elbows. "Where's Thor?"

#

Tony popped open his faceplate once it was clear that fresh hostilities were not on the immediate horizon. "Look on the bright side," he said to Steve. "Someone's having a worse day than you."

Barring the slightly awkward hitch in Tony's gait, which had become more than just slightly awkward in the suit, it hadn't been that hard to find Thor. They'd just followed the half-mile trail of what evidently passed for foreplay among Asgardians, which seemed to be roughly equivalent in destructive power to a tornado.

Thor and Loki had ended up at the bandshell, after taking down half a dozen of the elms and the statue of Shakespeare. Jarvis had shown Tony an extremely artistic photo taken (from a very safe distance) for the front page of the Times website, with Thor braced against the back wall with his head flung back, and a leaf from one of the elms positioned to tastefully hide Loki's bare ass from view.

The bandshell hadn't survived the experience. Thor and Loki were on the floor of the stage now amid the rubble, Loki still on top, staring at each other with amazingly identical expressions of horror on their faces. The interesting thing was that apparently they weren't letting that stop them, since Loki didn't seem to be pulling out and Thor didn't seem to be shoving him off.

SHIELD had finally shown up and was chasing away the television crews and the gawkers, only an hour late. Tony was willing to bet that Fury had watched the whole thing with a tub of popcorn until they'd all snapped out of it. He couldn't entirely blame the guy; it sounded good to him, too. At this point it was just the news helicopters, Thor and Loki, and the five of them all standing around awkwardly amid the remaining benches politely waiting.

After another ten minutes of waiting, during which Thor and Loki continued pretending to be immobile objects, Tony started to get bored. "You know, anytime you guys feel like finishing up over there, we could all go have a drink, I'm just saying," he called. "Loki, you're even invited this time." Tony felt strongly they needed a sorcery consult anyway, specifically on the subject of how to hunt down Amora and make her pay.

"Shut. Up." Loki said it through his teeth. Thor made a small faint whimpering noise and looked even more horrified.

Steve smacked Tony upside the head, which was unfair, but at least he wasn't looking like he was dwelling on the loss of his virtue anymore. They all stood and waited for another ten minutes. There was still zero movement.

Bruce suddenly said, "Uh. Thor? Loki? Is there an, uh, anatomical reason you might not be -- "

"We're _knotted_ ," Loki snarled, without moving. "Now shut up and leave us alone." Then he added, "And if there is one frame of this left on YouTube by the time we're loose, I will slaughter all the uploaders." He paused and added, "And disintegrate every last one of the servers. And possibly the continents on which they are housed."

"Jarvis, you could pass that along to the good director?" Tony said. "Also, what does knotted mean and why don't I know?"

"You've never been fond of dogs, sir," Jarvis said, before reading him the urbandictionary entry.

"So they're -- stuck?" Tony said, after some necessary processing. "Until -- "

"Until Loki reaches climax, most likely," Jarvis said. "Assuming that the term is translating correctly, but Loki's Allspeech is generally highly compatible with modern vernacular."

Tony looked over to where Loki and Thor were now staring off into different distances and doing their best to pretend they didn't even realize the other one was even in the vicinity. "All right then."

"What do we do?" Steve said, helplessly.

"Don't worry," Tony said. "I know exactly how to handle this situation."

He went and sat down on one of the undestroyed benches and ordered pizza and beer for everyone.

Two hours and six pizzas from Original Ray's later, Natasha covered a belch and stood up. It was starting to edge towards sunset. Joggers and bicycles had started going by on Park Drive in the distance again, so apparently the NYPD had reopened the park -- well, it was New York. The news crews and helicopters had all disappeared very rapidly once Loki's threat had propagated: one serious advantage to being a supervillain, Tony couldn't help but notice. He wished his people could get results like that.

Thor and Loki still hadn't moved, although Thor had looked over at the pizza with a wistful air a couple of times. Tony had thought about taking him over a slice, and then he'd caught Loki's murderous eye and thought better of getting in range.

"All right," Natasha said. "This isn't doing anyone any good." She walked out towards the two of them.

"Agent Romanoff, if you think I won't disembowel you with my bare hands just because I like you, you're very wrong," Loki said as she approached. Tony felt vaguely miffed: Loki liked Natasha? Since when did he like Natasha? Why not the rest of them?

"She only means to help," Thor protested.

Loki glared down at him. "Help? Help with _what?_ What could we possibly need help with?"

Thor opened his mouth and turned red and shut it again.

Natasha stopped safely out of arm's reach without climbing up onto the bandshell: she just leaned against the edge of the stage. Her mouth was roughly on a level with Loki's ears. "Oh, come on," she said, her voice low and sultry and amused. "Loki. Do you really need to pretend you hate this?"

Very slowly, Loki turned his head to stare at her. Natasha just smiled at him, slyly, and said in that same sexy voice, "Thor spread out under you? Completely helpless?" She leaned in a little more and said even lower, "Taking your cock?"

Thor was staring at her horrified now, too. Natasha flicked a glance at him -- Tony thought it might have been a little apologetic -- and then she said, "He already shivers every time you even shift your weight. I think he'd like it if you moved. Do you think maybe he'd even beg you for it?" She paused and added, "Beg you to use him?"

Tony tried to decide whether he was okay with this. Not that he had any objections to watching a little hot godly-brother-on-brother porn, but promoting it seemed a little far. At least given that Thor was the one getting, well, screwed. Tony checked in with the rest of the guys: Steve looked like there were now a dozen star-spangled kittens lined up in front of a firing squad and he was being asked to give the order. Bruce had a sort of half-admiring, half-squinched look. Clint was scarfing the last slice of the pepperoni while the rest of them weren't paying attention. When Tony caught his eye, Clint just shrugged. "Natasha knows what she's doing."

Tony shrugged and got himself another beer; Clint was probably right. Anyway, it was starting to be embarrassing watching two gods just sit there not doing anything.

Loki had stopped looking at Natasha and was staring off into nothing with his face blank. "Keep talking," he said, so apparently that was what a guy looked like when he was working himself up to fuck his brother.

Thor squawked -- there was no other word for it -- "What?" and half pushed himself up. The movement did something complicated down below, though, because a sudden wave of something went over his face and Loki made a noise. His hips jerked, once, a shallow movement, and Thor dragged in a shocked noisy breath and his shoulders and head thumped back down to the ground.

"Oh, he _does_ want it," Natasha said. "He needs it, doesn't he? To be brought low a little? To have someone really just _give_ it to him? Why shouldn't that be you?"

Loki shut his eyes and started moving. Thor started making noise almost right away, the same kind of deep grunt he made when he was in the middle of a fight taking a really big swing at something, which was now going to have extremely unfortunate associations. Loki started twisting his hips, a sinuous move, and Tony registered the temperature drop and looked up to see a mass of clouds pulling together, dark overhead.

Loki was panting harshly, braced against the ground, moving endlessly. Thor had his head flung back and was staring up at the sky blindly. He'd broken into short gasping cries, and he was starting to crumble the bandshell stage with his bare hands where he was clutching at the surface under him. "Loki," he groaned. " _Loki_."

Thunder rolled overhead, and Loki hooked an arm under one of Thor's legs and leaned forward -- Tony was impressed, he hadn't expected Thor to be quite that bendy, what with all the muscles. "Well?" Loki hissed.

Thor stared up at him, expression a mix between groggy and horrified.

"You heard her," Loki said. " _Beg me_."

Natasha had already come back to the bench for another slice of pizza, her work evidently complete. She pursed her mouth a little. "Possibly I shouldn't have used that exact angle," she said to Clint.

Clint shrugged back. "It got the job done."

Thor made the strategic error of getting angry and surging up against Loki. His eyes promptly rolled up into the back of his head and he fell back with a strangled moan. Loki laughed wildly. He put a hand on Thor's groin and pressed down, rocking his own hips forward three times, and Thor actually screamed a little and writhed against him.

Loki stopped, still laughing half breathlessly. "Ready to beg yet?"

"Occasionally you just have to admire someone's commitment to unending evil," Tony said to Steve. Steve was brick red and staring determinedly away towards Bethesda Fountain.

"What?" Steve said, glancing at him. "Wait a second, are you _watching?_ That is -- " He saw Tony's raised eyebrow, looked around, and realized all of them were watching. "Stop it!" He glared around.

They looked back at him. Everyone had pretty much gotten comfortable on the benches with their third or fourth beer. Tony patted Steve on the shoulder. "Pretending it never happened is not an option when the entire world has seen it happening and will never let you forget it," he said. "Part of the hazards of the superhero gig. Just accept the compensatory incest porn of the gods."

"Compensatory?" Steve said. "This is -- " He involuntarily looked over at where Loki was now making the very shallowest of thrusts. Thor was writhing even more, like he was desperately trying to get Loki to move.

"Hot, although I'll grant you that's pretty disturbing in and of itself," Bruce said, taking another bite of mushroom and broccoli.

"Loki!" Thor howled. " _Please_." Well, begging was a go.

Loki groaned and shoved Thor nearly double, fucked him machine-gun-fast another six times, then threw his head back and came while Thor made loud cries of Tony wasn't quite sure what -- crazed passion? ecstasy? horror? Whatever it was, Thor came too, in the middle of it, messily.

Even after Loki had apparently finished, though, he hung out unmoving between Thor's legs for a while. Just when Tony was about to start checking his watch again, Loki shuddered all over, and Thor gave another moan and jerked against him. That happened another four or five times, at gradually increasing intervals. Thor was limp as a rag by the last time, his whole body just sprawled out and trembling, and then Loki finally sighed out long and slow and slid out. He fell off Thor and onto his back.

Steve had been about to start in on one last slice. It hung in the air in front of his open mouth. Clint and Bruce were staring. Natasha actually raised an eyebrow. "Well," Tony said, to fill the horrified silence, "I guess he's not compensating for a sense of inadequacy."

Also Tony made a note, _sleeping with a god_ was definitely off his list of things he was saving up the doghouse cards for. Thor's cock had always looked pretty normal -- huge, but normal -- but apparently Asgardians had a truly nightmare-level stealth feature.

It wasn't so much the big swollen knob the Internet had already told him so much about, which despite the obvious issues of unpredictable timing could still have been serious fun. But there was also a ring underneath it, which had features significantly resembling the mouth of the Sarlacc. Tony was no longer even slightly unclear why Thor hadn't just bit the bullet and shoved Loki off, uncomfortable or not.

The teeth -- _teeth_ , dear God -- were still smoothing down and vanishing under the sheath that apparently swelled up into the knot. In a minute Loki's cock looked horribly deceptively like an ordinary cock -- with _no teeth_ \-- and then it finally softened against his thigh.

Loki and Thor were wide awake and staring up at the ceiling, side by side. It really was funny how two guys who looked so completely different could look that much the same.

"I'm going to eviscerate Amora for this," Loki said after a while.

"She is not a warrior," Thor said, but not with a lot of conviction.

"I'll do it by accident," Loki said.

They fell silent for a while. Then Loki's mouth twitched a little. His eyes got brighter. He bit his lip. Tony watched fascinated: it was like seeing a train building up steam while heading for a cliff. Thor apparently caught it out of the corner of his eye and slowly, indignantly turned his head, his expression saying Loki was _really not going to go there_ \--

"I'm glad you liked it, at least," Loki said, and oh yeah, he was going there. "Especially the part where I _enthrained_ you -- "

The word didn't translate the way Allspeech usually did, but Tony got the strong impression it was essentially like _fucked_ but taken to several exponents, with all the most dickish connotations, although it was always possible those were automatic due to Loki being the one talking. Thor made a wordless noise of outrage and grabbed for Loki's throat. Loki had already rolled away; he went over the edge of the bandshell and came up on his feet, his armor shaping itself out of thin air around him. He smirked at Thor, who propped up on an elbow, pointed at him and roared, "That is _not_ a decent jest!"

"What?" Loki said, with wide eyes. "I just wished to be sure I hadn't overtaxed you, dear brother -- "

Except Loki had forgotten Mjolnir. Thor narrowed his eyes. The hammer came flying from across the park and smacked Loki from behind, bonging his helmeted forehead forward against the edge of the bandshell stage with a noisy echoing clang. Loki staggered back with the recoil, wobbling, and sat down hard on the ground blinking. Some more of the stage crumbled and fell off.

Thor stood up with Mjolnir in his hand and a satisfied expression. Then a strange look crossed his face. Tony winced in sympathy. Yeah, that was the _someone came in my ass not that long ago_ face. Except in this case it was _my brother came in my ass_ , which took it to a special level. Possibly with the extra-extra-special addition of _and I liked it_.

"Ow," Loki said after a moment, from the ground.

"Augh," Thor said in dismay.

#

They took Loki back to Stark Tower with them, for lack of anything better to do with him. He'd busted out of SHIELD's latest containment unit only three days ago, a new record time of six minutes and twenty-seven seconds after they'd put him into it, and the six minutes had been him making fun of it. They didn't have anything else to try even in blueprint. At least Stark Tower had Xbox.

Sending him back to Asgard was out. As soon as Fury had suggested it, Loki had started laughing his head off again, and when he'd gotten his breath back said to Thor, "Really. Send me back to Asgard. To be interrogated about what just happened. Before the entire court. Under truth spell. _By the Allfather_."

Thor had blanched so completely Tony had wondered if they were about to see him faint, and then he'd gone all the other way brick-red. He'd awkwardly mumbled something about Heimdall being too busy to trouble for passage at the moment, not meeting anyone's eyes, while Loki smirked. Anyway, Tony was initially all for having Loki around: Project Make Amora Pay had taken the spot at the top of his list, and Loki was on board.

The problem was that Loki wasn't so much on board as he was raising the army, building the siege engines, and leading the charge. The issue started developing that same afternoon while they all sat more-or-less groggily around the conference table, Fury on the screen unsmiling except for a certain amused glint in his one eye. Loki somehow ended up being the one outlining what they needed, how they were going to track her down, how they were going to bring her in, and getting signoff for a raft of things that Tony was mildly annoyed to realize he wouldn't himself have gotten from Fury in a million years.

It only got worse from there over the next couple of weeks as the project took off. It hadn't ever occurred to Tony before to really think of Thor and Loki as princes: as warriors, sure, but Thor made what Tony now realized had to be a deliberate effort not to take charge of things. That was irritatingly condescending now he'd noticed it. The only thing that kept Tony from being more pissed off at Thor was that he noticed it in the context of Loki doing the opposite, and it was frankly alarming how good even Thor's annoying little brother was at worming his way into being in charge. The whole taking-over-the-world scheme suddenly took on a new dimension of plausibility when you realized that the guy could somehow coax his worst enemies into working to his direction _without_ any obvious mind control that all Tony's scanning could detect.

To be fair, Loki had the hefty advantage of a power vacuum. Steve was still wandering around traumatized. 4chan had collectively started a meme of rickrolling him with the endless youtube videos of him fucking Tony. There were no shortage of those, edited in many interesting combinations: possibly people compensating for having had to trash all their Loki/Thor footage on account of not wanting to die by crazed supervillain.

Steve managed to fall for it on a weekly basis, every single time he sat down to laboriously hunt and peck his way through his email. Tony had tried to give him some advice, but, well. Steve still fell for half the phishing attacks he got and refused to set up spam filtering because of the one time it had caught an email from a sick kid asking for a personal note from Captain America. They'd had to isolate his computer from the rest of the Avengers' systems, so Jarvis couldn't even help him.

Tony caught Natasha aside to discuss the situation, but she didn't seem to think it was a problem. "Loki's objectives are aligned with ours right now," she said calmly.

"And you're not in the least troubled by having him in charge," Tony said.

"Having an ego-driven man take on the leadership role in an operation?" She shrugged and sipped her espresso.

"Yes, but this is _Loki_ ," Tony said.

Natasha looked at him in a way that said very clearly she wasn't seeing all that profound a distinction. Tony was somewhat inclined to take that personally.

Thor was also pretty traumatized. He'd tried to get Jane to come out for a visit because he desperately wanted the last time he'd had sex to be a very different memory. Reasonable, Tony felt, and Jane had been clearly determined to be supportive and had been ready to drop everything and come. But then Thor had gone on to tell Jane very earnestly that he didn't want her to feel any sense of having to live up to Loki's performance.

There had been a certain initial silence at that point, which had made Tony just shake his head. And also to wonder why Thor was having this conversation in the kitchen, but he'd given up on getting Thor to notice most of the boundaries between public and private space.

Tony could practically see Jane taking a deep breath and deciding not to judge when Thor, getting anxious, had added, "You have not the _tenrath_ ," which Allspeech conveyed was something incredibly awesome and sexy, "and of course," he went on in loving tones, obviously trying to reassure, while Tony covered his face, "you are but mortal, and cannot match him for strength or ferocity -- "

Jane didn't come.

Meanwhile Loki had clearly made the executive decision that he was _not_ traumatized, he was deeply amused by the whole thing -- except for the part where he was working on a disturbingly detailed process for killing Amora over the course of twelve days. Tony had seen the sketches. (Very artistic.)

Loki was also proving his own lack of trauma to himself by teasing Thor about the sex constantly. He'd graduated to bad touching several times a day by now, and Thor was starting to flinch if a shadow moved even when Loki wasn't anywhere around.

Well. Flinch and pop some serious wood, which all of them were doing their best out of courtesy to ignore, but Tony gave it another two weeks before Loki went too far and Thor jumped him and they both had hysterics and probably took out a city block if no one stopped them. He and Bruce were taking turns keeping an eye on them.

Thank God at least Bruce hadn't lost his mind. However, he _had_ pretty wistfully mentioned to Tony it had been his first blowjob since that little incident with the gamma rays. After a hasty negotiation with Pepper, who liked Bruce and therefore agreed to let Tony apply one of his cards to a long-term exception, Tony got to work. His first step was rigging an emergency eject system that would let Jarvis yank him away out of range faster than the so-far-established top speed of hulking out, and went to town. The danger level was a massive turn-on, especially once his safety was dependent on the effective functioning of his own work and therefore a direct personal challenge.

He'd tried to come up with some way to expand the sexual options past oral and frottage, but it was tricky: Jarvis had without comment shown them the truly horrifying animated simulations of the intersection of the eject system with anal penetration, in either direction. "Oh, yeah, that would be great," Bruce had said, vetoing even preliminary experimentation. "Also are you nuts? This is incredible," he'd added, which, granted, since Tony had been sucking his cock at the time again, but Tony hated limitations on principle.

Anyway, that extremely engrossing project had been taking up significant amounts of his own mental processing capacity, which gave Loki still more of an opening for seizing power, but even Clint hadn't been able to argue with Tony's priorities once he understood the levels of deprivation Bruce had been operating under.

"But Jesus, Stark," Clint said, downing another shot. "Loki running around pulling the strings? It feels like being brainwashed again, you know? Only with all of you stuck under _with_ me, so there isn't even anyone out there to save me. And Natasha just says we should focus on the operation. I knew I shouldn't let her fuck me, she doesn't respect guys who let her fuck them."

Tony was of the opinion that Natasha viewed men who let her fuck them as making the most rational life decision available to them, and suspected that what she didn't respect was guys who were still refusing to admit that they loved having her fuck them. He floated that cautiously by her the next day with a hint that maybe she could cut Clint some slack, and she just rolled her eyes at him.

"I don't blame _Clint_ ," she snapped. "I had that situation under control until Amora interfered."

"What, the situation where Clint pretends he's not crazy about you and you pretend you're -- " Tony paused, he wasn't sure what Natasha was pretending in this scenario.

"Yes," Natasha said. "Clint doesn't trust himself yet. He needed another two or three major operational successes first, and I could wait: it wasn't going to be more than a year. I had _hotel reservations_ ," she added, her eyes glittering, and Tony suddenly realized why Natasha was as fine as she was with Loki dismantling all their brake systems and setting them full steam ahead after Amora. There was nothing she hated more than having someone blunder in and fuck up one of her ops as a side effect.

#

So they were all more or less a distracted mess, and of course that was when the Chitauri decided to show up again. This time, without a convenient portal to shut off: there was just an army of them ten million strong coming into Pluto's orbit, one month away from making Earth.

"If they want Loki -- " one of the SHIELD oversight committee began, stupidly, in the emergency conference.

That predictably got a very large hammer _thunked_ on the table and a very large god of thunder standing up and leaning towards him saying very angrily, " -- then we will _refuse_ their low and cowardly demands, unless you desire war with Asgard instead."

Tony had made a point of watching Loki as soon as the exchange had started, so caught him staring at Thor as though that was a surprise to him for about 0.3 nanoseconds before Loki got his face back under control and securely into the _tolerantly smug_ setting.

"They _would_ be happy to take me if they could get me," Loki said, "but I'm afraid they'd be equally happy to continue on to slaughter all the inhabitants of your planet afterwards."

"What do they want?" Fury said.

"Death," Loki said. "Mine, yours, their own. The death of stars and galaxies. They're not picky."

Thor was ready to call in the legions of Asgard to help, except when he called to Heimdall, he didn't get an answer. He stared up at the sky for nearly three hours waiting and yelling occasionally, before giving up and storming in, looking furious; the fury turned to fear when he looked at Loki's face and said slowly, "Brother, what is it?"

"The army that approaches is not large enough to be the bulk of the Chitauri forces," Loki said. "And their realm is nearer Asgard than Midgard. If they set forth at the same time, they would have reached Asgard a week ago already."

So, no cavalry.

Thor and Loki both seemed pretty sick at the idea that Asgard was under attack and neither of them was there. Tony initially had no problem with the result, which was it turned them both stone-cold deadly focused on the army that was on the way to Earth. Except then everything Tony had suspected about Thor holding out on them turned out to be true.

Loki disappeared for an hour, somehow arranging a giant summit meeting of the leaders of all the industrialized nations of the world behind Fury's back. That turned into the predictable noisy squabble until Thor walked into the room in full armor, _glowing_ somehow, roared them all into silence, and demanded and got command of the entire planet in about ten minutes.

"Are we okay with this?" Tony said to Steve, watching the President sign the executive order.

" _No_ ," Steve said; his face was a grim mask of horror. He stood up and got into Thor's path as Thor headed out of the room again with a fistful of papers that Loki was taking out of his hands as they walked.

Tony stuck by his side, even when Thor stopped and turned his somehow unbearably blue gaze on them both, but he had never been more impressed with Steve in his life, and that was saying something. It was taking all the balls he himself had, which he liked to think were significant in capacity, not to get down on his knees.

"Earth isn't a fiefdom of Asgard," Steve said. His shoulders were ramrod straight, and he was looking Thor right in the face. Tony backed Steve up by looking everywhere else.

Loki snorted, but Thor put out a hand and said to Steve gently, "No: but your people have not yet the wisdom to unite to meet this threat. Forgive me, my friend; I would this course were not the only one we have to hand, and Asgard's own safety in the balance, which must be my first duty. Will you take my word, that I will do all in my power to undo the unjust dominion I have taken here, should we prove victorious?"

Steve was silent a moment. "You've earned that," he said finally, "but if something happens to you -- "

"Loki will be bound also by my word," Thor said. Loki raised an eyebrow that said _oh really?_ until Thor turned and caught him by the shoulder and shook him. "It must be so," Thor said to him. "Should I fall, even for a time, the command must come to you, brother -- "

Uh, how about _no_ , Tony was about to say, but Thor was going on. "And my friends must be able to follow you without hesitation should that come to pass. You know we cannot afford to lose this battle, nor even that it should drag on. Swear, brother, and swear truly."

Loki blew out an irritated breath and said, "Do you realize what you're asking me to swear? Do you really want me bound to do _all in my power_ to undo this? You haven't always been fond of the consequences of my ingenuity."

Thor paused, and looked wary, which, no kidding. "Short of the death of innocents," he said.

"Fine, yes," Loki said, rolling his eyes. "You're so idiotically uncreative. Have you already forgotten that time with the chariot and the goats and the seven casks of ale? Or what about that time you had to hide in the fire giantess's glove?"

Thor threw Tony and Steve a deeply mortified expression that, actually, helped significantly to dispel the godliness effect. "Ah," he said awkwardly. "Well. Perhaps not _all_ \-- "

Loki smirked. Tony eyed them both: he didn't feel spoiled for choice here, but all things considered, he leaned towards the option that involved Loki being obligated to hand Earth back to them. Even if he did it after turning the oceans into bubblebath and installing a new species of intelligent dog overlords. "Thor," he said. "Loki swears too, or we're not in."

"Are we supposed to be fools?" Loki said dryly. "You're _not in_ on the saving of your planet?"

Granted, it was a pretty weak bluff, but you had to play the cards you had. It turned out to be good enough, anyway: Thor looked deeply torn, but then he swallowed and said, "Enough, brother. Yes. Swear the oath with me."

"Fine," Loki said, with a mean glitter in his eye. "I do so swear. Don't blame _me_ when you wake up in a midden somewhere, turned into a pink -- " Thor coughed very loudly.

Mobilization turned out to work a lot faster and better when you had a god running the show. The hardest part turned out to be collecting the ridiculous things that Loki demanded, including a wine bottle made of diamond and filled with the tears of mothers, which were not that hard to acquire when the destruction of the Earth was at hand but extremely unpleasant to collect, particularly when only one drop could come from each mother.

There was also the shadow of the sun, which Tony still didn't understand how Loki had managed to get, even though Loki had been violently annoyed at having to go after it himself and seemed to think they were wasting his time out of laziness; and one million tons of nonbiodegradable garbage, which conversely Loki was impressed by their having easily available in several locations. He even grudgingly complimented Tony -- who had somehow ended up in charge of the Loki requisition brigade, presumably for his sins, except this punishment could only have been earned by significantly more of those than Tony remembered having enjoyed -- on Earth's forward-thinking emergency planning.

Tony finally went to Thor and demanded to know what the hell all the stuff was intended for. "Some magic, no doubt," Thor said absently, as he looked over the layout of the Chitauri army, which they could see a lot better now: they were passing Jupiter.

"And it doesn't bother you not to know _what_ magic exactly?" Tony said. "From Loki?"

Thor paused and looked up at him uncertainly. "It will dismay our foes?"

"You trust him," Tony said. Thor just kept looking at him blankly. "Right, forget I asked."

The magic turned out to be swapping Earth and Mars. Tony didn't get what had happened at first: he woke up on the blood-red ground, shivering, with the sun a lot smaller in the sky than he remembered it being. "What the _hell_ ," he said, and a lot of yelling ensued before they figured out what Loki had done, a process made more difficult by Loki being flat on his back unconscious from doing it.

It seemed to be some kind of deeply complicated mix of illusion and actual exchange: everyone in the army -- meaning evidently every person who had taken an oath of military service -- and all their gear and all the mobilized supply had moved to Mars, along with a layering illusion on top and some other magic that was making it possible for them to breathe. If you looked at Earth in a telescope, it looked small and blood-red and deserted; apparently everything else was still there underneath.

"Stop whining at me," Loki snapped, when they'd dumped a bucket of boiling water on him. (Ice water hadn't had any effect.) "Did _you_ want to have to fight with endless numbers of wailing civilians running around begging for protection?"

"What happens if the Chitauri figure it out and go after Earth instead while we're all here?" Steve yelled.

Loki rolled his eyes. "Why would they?" he said. "They have no idea that your planet doesn't have places that look like this, and even if they did work it out, they'll be perfectly happy to finish killing all of us before they continue onward."

The night before the Chitauri were due to hit, Tony woke up with Steve sitting on the end of his cot, staring down at his hands. "So, uh," Steve said after Tony had made bleary inquisitive noises at him, "I realize that I could have handled the whole -- the -- the thing -- better -- "

Tony was still groggy, but not _that_ groggy. He short-circuited the rest of the boring and awkward and dragged Steve down on top of him and enthusiastically attacked his clothes. Steve made muffled sounds struggling from inside his shirt for a few seconds and then recognized the merits of Tony's approach and started cooperating. Nakedness and horizontality were achieved in a respectable timeframe. "I just," Steve gasped, while Tony worked at taking his gigantic cock again, which was significantly more of a challenge when he wasn't high on pixie dust or whatever Amora had used and the only lube available was a small bottle of hand lotion, "I wanted to -- "

"Yes," Tony said absently; he was busy. "I feel the same way. Honor working with you, profound respect, admiration united with affection, carpe diem, yadda yadda -- "

"What?" Steve said.

"Wasn't that the speech?" Tony said. "Aaah," he groaned as he managed to get it the rest of the way.

"No!" Steve said, strangled. "You're crazy and an ass most of the time and -- and -- "

"My goodness," Tony said, shocked. "Steve Rogers, have you gone and fallen in love with me?"

"I hate you so much," Steve groaned, and proceeded to fuck Tony through the cot. Literally: seven thrusts and the legs collapsed and they were on the floor. Steve didn't stop, though, so that was okay. Tony kept his legs wrapped around Steve's unfairly slim waist, already mentally rehearsing the conversation in which he was going to persuade Pepper that really he should get to apply another card to this situation going forward.

"I don't want to -- to screw up things with -- with you and Bruce," Steve said afterwards, staring at the roof of the tent. "And, um, with -- you and Pepper?"

"Are you kidding me?" Tony said. "This is exactly what Bruce and I needed: more variables. I was at a standstill up until now. Hey. Hey, you're bisexual, right?"

"I, uh, I guess," Steve said.

"Excellent," Tony said, rubbing his hands. Bingo. Pepper was firmly not up for anything that might land her in the vicinity of the Hulk, but Tony was confident she would be happy to add Steve and his magnificent cock to the mutual exceptions list along with Rhodey -- not that Tony had ever actually gotten Rhodey to sleep with him ("on a cold day in hell, my friend") but Tony was confident he'd turn that around one of these days.

"You think Pepper's hot, don't you?" he added, just to check.

Steve blushed. "Tony!" he said, which meant yes, I _have_ in fact jerked off a few times thinking about your fantastically amazing girlfriend and how I would love to put my giant cock between her gorgeous breasts, which Tony confirmed by asking and seeing Steve's eyes get huge and mortified while he proved not actually able to deny it.

"Trust me," Tony said, "Pepper is not going to have a problem with this scenario." He was tempted to add -- because he could tell that Steve secretly and guiltily loved his giant cock -- that Pepper would also take great pleasure in ordering him in her best boardroom voice to fuck her with it, to really fill her up, and then to fuck Tony right afterwards next to her and show him what a real cock felt like, but on consideration Tony thought it would be more fun for Steve to find that out for himself.

"Listen, just don't die tomorrow," he said instead. "Trust me, I already have several things in mind you're going to want to be around for."

Steve laughed a little, half exasperated. "Tony, you are so -- " He stopped, clearly at a loss for sufficient superlatives to complete that sentence, and then he kissed Tony and they went to sleep.

#

The battle was long and brutal, endless. It didn't seem to happen in normal time or by the normal laws of physics; Tony fought, and fought, and fought, going back in to reload and recharge whenever necessary, hearing Thor's voice roaring orders like Thor was right next to him and finding his body almost automatically turning to obey.

At one point in the fighting Thor _was_ right next to him, wreathed in lightning and blazing glory, burning in a way that made Tony feel unironically and deliriously happy to be fighting beside him, ready to die for him, ready to melt into a part of a greater whole under his command. It felt amazing.

Thor moved away a little while later and Tony got better, but _what the fuck_ , seriously. He glared at Loki's smirk the next time he went back in.

"Why, Stark," Loki said blandly, "what's the matter? Finding it a little difficult to shine beside my brother?"

"Look who's talking," Tony said, with a scowl. He had to know, though. "Is this something a lot of Asgardians can do?"

Loki snorted. "There's a reason Thor is heir to the throne." There was a bitter edge to his voice. "Men will follow Tyr, because he carries victory in his hand; and they'll follow my father, because his wisdom lights the way. But when Thor leads, men follow with deepest joy in their hearts."

"And what about when you lead?" Tony said, eyes narrowing.

Loki's mouth just twisted and he didn't say, but two days into the fighting -- according to Jarvis, anyway; Tony had no idea, he didn't remember sleeping and he didn't remember eating -- two days into the fighting he showed up on Tony's six, blasted off a Chitauri warrior who'd been doing his best to gnaw off one of Tony's arms through the suit, and said to him, "Do you think we're winning?"

Tony had been trying very hard not to think about that. The Chitauri kept coming, and each one of them could take any fifty human soldiers. They were faster, they were harder, they were better equipped. The disparity between the Chitauri armored units and theirs were even worse. The only reason they hadn't been completely crushed yet was the nukes, which were only getting through the Chitauri defenses an average of one in twenty at this point, and once the Chitauri had fully deployed on the ground, which was not that far away, there wasn't going to be anything to nuke without taking out their own people.

"Fine," Tony said to Loki. "What's your plan?"

Loki grinned at him madly, and right, so that was why people followed him: to ride the roller coaster. "Call your friends."

Seventeen hours later, Tony watched Clint fire the final hail-mary shot straight into the maw of the big Chitauri destroyer, the arrow rigged with magic and antimatter and a little bit of C4 just for spice. The arrow hit dead-on, and with a huge blinding-white explosion down the destroyer came, face-first into the surface of the planet, throwing up a giant cloud of red dust and ash blanketing half their troops, and Tony whooped with glee as it went, pounding Hulk on the shoulder. Hulk said, "Boom!" appreciatively.

The secondary explosions started to go after that, tearing through the Chitauri, and after that the tertiary ones that Tony had sort of been hoping for, and then after that the fourth wave he hadn't expected at all, and suddenly some interesting small earthquakes were happening, and then volcanoes started going off all around them and the sky started to catch on fire.

"Uh oh," Hulk said.

"Hm," Loki said thoughtfully, as a burning tornado touched down towards the back of the Chitauri army and started heading for them, "I might have miscalculated a little."

Thor landed with a thump beside them: he was smeared with blood and red dirt and panting. "What have you done?" he demanded.

"Well," Loki said, "we might have destroyed the planet."

Tony watched the ground starting to break open. Gouts of magma erupted around the still-smoldering corpse of the destroyer, and it fell into a widening crack, taking about ten thousand Chitauri with it. The smoke and ash was still far enough away he wasn't breathing it yet, but it was on the way.

Steve wiped his forehead and looked behind them at the ranks of Earth's armies, the front lines still engaged with the Chitauri. Tony had to admit, he was pretty impressed with the French Foreign Legion, who were doing a number on the left flank. "I don't suppose you can get us all out of here?" Steve asked Loki grimly.

Loki said, "I'm thinking."

"Hey," Tony said, pointing to the army's dump site, "would more trash help?"

The trash did help. Loki managed to pull what was left of the army out to one of Mars's moons as a halfway measure, and said in about sixty-two hours -- something about orbits -- he could start sending people back to Earth in batches. In the meantime, they all got to hang out in a shiny dome of atmosphere, eating MREs and enjoying the deeply disturbing experience of watching a planet that looked exactly like Earth slowly break apart into a new asteroid belt. The remnants of the Chitauri had retreated: Loki thought they were going home perfectly convinced that Earth had been destroyed. He was now pretending that had been his plan all along.

Tony was sitting under the collapsing planet drinking some of the local rotgut -- someone had already come up with a still, of course -- when Thor joined him. He'd put away some of the shiny golden aura, but Tony was still more than a little wary, although that didn't stop him sharing his booze. Thor looked up at what was left of Mars and sighed. "Do you suppose Jane may abate her wrath with me a little, now that we have saved your world?" he said wistfully.

"Thor, pal, don't take this the wrong way," Tony said, "but considering what she was already putting up with, I'm surprised you didn't already have to spend all your time groveling as a default state."

Thor frowned puzzled. "Have I been so very inconsiderate, by your lights?" he said.

"Actually, I meant the -- " Tony waved in the general direction of Thor's crotch.

Thor stared down at himself. "Is my endowment of excessive size? Jane has not remarked upon it with displeasure -- "

"It's more the _teeth_ ," Tony said.

"What?" Thor said. Then he flushed. "Ah. That I do not have -- I have not -- "

"You don't?" Tony said. "Not all Asgardians have the -- ?" he made little clawing fingers in the air.

"No," Thor said stiffly. "The _tenrath_ is a rare gift. Few indeed possess it. There is no -- it is not counted a vital lack, among us -- a man may yet satisfy a lover well -- "

"Wait," Tony said, staring at Thor. "Wait, wait, wait. _You're_ compensating for a sense of inadequacy?"

"But surely Jane would not count it so against me," Thor went on, sounding hurt. "I have not seen any man among you have it at all: it must be still more rare here."

"Uh, yeah, we're a little short on cocks with teeth," Tony said, except dammit, now he couldn't help wondering what the hell was so awesome about them, and when he went back to base and spotted Loki working on the back-to-earth spell, it was with a sense of watching himself from a distance that he went to Loki and said, "Okay, so listen, the whole knot thing -- "

"Oh my fucking God," Tony said, half an hour later.

"Yes?" Loki said. "What?" He smirked and did the thing with his hips again, and a hundred tiny orgasms went off in Tony's body, like firecrackers on a string. The knot was a massive presence jammed right up against Tony's prostate, impossibly huge and swollen, and the teeth, oh _fuck_ , the teeth weren't sharp, they were _flexible_ \-- like tiny little grippers -- and they _moved independently_ , all of them, whenever Loki even shifted his weight a little. Tony whimpered.

Everything was going appallingly well from there when Natasha suddenly stuck her head in. "Sorry to interrupt," she said, while Loki paused to raise an eyebrow at her and Tony stared blind and helpless at the tent ceiling and tried to remember how he'd gotten here and what his name was. "It looks like the atmosphere shell is failing at the north end of the encampment -- some of the troops there are reporting trouble breathing. I asked Thor, but he couldn't figure it out -- "

"Of course Thor can't figure it out," Loki snapped, and then he casually pushed Tony's leg up and fucked into him a couple more times and came, abruptly, just like that. The teeth all squirmed at once and let go. Tony made a faint whining noise like steam escaping from a kettle as Loki slid back out of him and stood up.

Loki walked out of the tent, his armor already shaping itself around his naked body. Natasha came to stand over Tony and kicked him in the hip, hard. "ngnha," Tony wheezed faintly, meaning, _What did I do?_

"In case it's escaped your attention," she said, "we're all relying on Loki to _get us back to Earth_. Stop distracting him until _after_ we all have a real atmosphere again."

She dragged him out of the tent and sent him staggering wild-eyed back to his own, where Steve and Bruce were camped out playing cards. "Steve, please for the love of God fuck me right now," Tony said, desperately, and dropped his pants and fell down onto the cot. "Bruce: jerking off onto us, turn-on? Yes/no?"

"On a theoretical basis, it's possible that could work for me," Bruce said, laying down a full gin rummy. "Steve, did Tony actually have a conversation with you about this out loud at some point, or did he just do it all in his head and skip the boring talking-to-other-people part?"

"To be honest, I think I prefer it when he skips that part, too," Steve said, sounding resigned.

"I knew there was a reason I adored you," Tony said into the pillow. "Also your cock. Your beautiful gigantic completely human cock. Please put it in me right now."

There was an ominous silence. Tony looked around to see Steve standing still, his hands on the bottom of his shirt. Steve said suspiciously, "Tony, what did you do?"

Tony thought fast. "So, I would like to invoke the just-saved-the-world card -- "

" _We_ saved the world," Steve said. " _Together_. You don't get a card from me for it!"

"Oh, come on!" Tony said. "Steve, you're killing me, I need the cards!" He looked at Bruce pleadingly.

Bruce raised his hands. "Sorry, I'm not going to referee. I think it would be bad for my blood pressure. Anyway, I'm happy sharing my toys."

"You slept with Loki!" Steve said to Tony. "Didn't you!"

"It's possible that, that in the spirit of experimentation and inter-planetary relations, not to mention in the interests of securing a positive working relationship with -- "

"I don't believe you!" Steve yelled. "You weren't even drugged!"

After several rounds of negotiation and sex, Steve finally agreed that Tony could get cards, although he planned to award them only for extremely boring things like Tony doing all his house chores on time and showing up for press conferences. "You've got to give me this one freebie, though," Tony said. "I mean, alien god with a magic cock, come on."

Steve glared at him. "I hope he got you _pregnant."_

Tony stared at him in sudden horror. Steve stared back at him, his own eyes going wide. "I was joking," he said.

"I'm ninety-nine percent certain you can't be pregnant, Tony," Bruce said.

Steve looked at him. "Ninety-nine percent?"

Bruce shrugged. "Magic."

"Right," Tony managed. He was _also_ completely sure, but just in case, he decided to check. "So," he said to Thor hurriedly the next day, "that time, you and Loki -- you couldn't have -- gotten pregnant, right?"

Thor eyed him sidelong, like Tony was a little strange or something. "I am not a woman, Stark," he said.

"Good, good," Tony said, relieved. "So the whole, the toothy cock, he can't get a guy pregnant -- "

"No, of course not. But why do you -- ?" Thor said puzzledly, and then his eyes widened and he seemed to get _bigger_ and he roared, "Loki!"

"What?" Loki said to Thor, when tracked down in his tent. "He asked me respectfully enough, and he wasn't entirely useless in the war. I chose to favor him. What concern is it of yours?"

Tony was not particularly down with this interpretation of his and Loki's recent funtimes, but he was for once exercising discretion and not getting himself involved any further in what was clearly about to be a very fraught relationship conversation. "I'm just going to step out here for a minute," he said, backing carefully towards the tent door, and made his escape: Thor was swelling up like a bullfrog with indignation and Loki was glaring back at him viciously, so neither of them even noticed. Tony fled, figuring it was just as well that they were all temporarily stuck on an uninhabited moon.

#

The tent had spells of silence on it, and it didn't actually explode, so none of them knew what happened inside, but Thor and Loki were very pointedly not talking to each other by the time they all landed back on Earth to an even more radical heroes' welcome than usual. There was literal hysteria in the crowds that filled the streets, and the crowds were bigger than Tony had ever seen. People were screaming for them all, but when Thor went by, that turned into falling on their knees and sobbing with religious fervor.

Loki went into diva overdrive mode and insisted on their racing around to visit every major city of the world, apparently to lap up the adulation. Tony tried to corner Thor and talk him into stopping the victory tour, but he'd gotten even more impossible to be around than he had been during the battle, and Steve wasn't sure about calling it off anyway. "This was big, Tony," he said. "People had a lot of time to see it coming, they know how close we came. I think they need some kind of closure."

"They don't need _a god_ ," Tony said flatly.

"Yeah," Steve said, heaving a breath, "-- well, not Thor, anyway."

"Guys, I'd settle for not _Loki_ ," Clint put in, and no one disagreed with that. Loki was sticking to Thor's side during the parades even if they weren't actually speaking to one another, and the shining glory was rubbing off. People seemed to have completely forgotten he was a horrifying bad guy who'd murdered thousands and the one who'd set the Chitauri on the planet in the first place. Literally: Tony tried reminding people about it, and they just stared at him blankly and then thirty seconds later were saying, hey, how about the way he blew up Mars!

" _We_ blew up Mars!" Tony said. "In fact, if you want to get technical, _Clint_ blew up Mars! With an arrow! Why don't we tell them to worship _him?_ "

"I'd be okay with that," Clint said.

"Let's not do that," Steve said. "Also, I don't think we should be bragging about it when it was an accident."

"We were in the right place at the right time to have the accident," Tony said. "It counts."

But when they finally came back to New York and the crowd actually fell completely silent and went to their knees in a wave following Thor and Loki down the street, even Steve was done. He called them all together and they went into Avengers Tower together, as a team, and found Thor and Loki on the main terrace. "Okay," Steve said, while Tony tried not to look too hard at either of them: they both hurt to look at. "This ends now."

Thor looked at Loki, who said, "It should be enough."

"Enough for _what?_ " Tony said.

Thor turned and said, "I am sorry, my friends, but Loki could not conjure the power required for our journey to Asgard save through the worship of your people, and we must go to the aid of our realm. If we live, we will keep our oath to you: to return, and work to dispel this false glory."

Loki rolled his eyes. "The glory is perfectly real," he said. "We _did_ save their insect world. Yes, yes, _fine_ , I've already promised," he snapped when Thor turned reproachfully towards him. "I suggest the rest of you stand back, unless you want to be taken by the portal."

"Hang on," Steve said, taking a step. "Are you saying we _can_ come? Thor -- can we help you?"

"This is not your battle, my friends," Thor said. "A war on Asgard's soil will be of a dimension you can scarcely comprehend: the forces of the Chitauri will be a hundred times more numerous, and those arrayed to meet them equally upon a higher plane."

"You've still got to bring them down one after another," Steve said. He looked at the rest of them.

"What the hell," Tony said. "I'm in." He closed his faceplate and cut the external audio feed for a moment and muttered, "Jarvis, clear out every last byte of disk space you can, and make sure we record _everything_."

"Understood, sir," Jarvis said.

"Sure, why not," Bruce said. "I don't think the Hulk's going to care what planet he's smashing on."

"If you guys have anything like arrows, I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to shoot 'em," Clint said.

He glanced at Natasha with a question: she looked thoughtful and then nodded briefly. "Let's go," she said. Tony eyed her a little doubtfully: Natasha was a hell of a melee fighter by Earth standards, but she was going to be out of her weight class in hand-to-hand fighting on Asgard, and this mission wasn't exactly going to have a lot of room for spy work.

"Very well," Loki said. "Take hands with Thor, and do _try_ not to let go while we're going through the portal. Unless you'd like to experience free-falling through all of time and space, which I don't recommend."

"Right, not letting go, check," Bruce said, half under his breath.

They were about to take hands when there was a sudden distortion in the air. Loki straightened like a tiger pricking up its ears, ready to spring, as abruptly Amora was standing there on the terrace with her giant pal Skurge behind her. " _You_ ," Loki breathed, his hands coming up glowing; Thor had half-raised Mjolnir.

She raised her hands empty in a pacifying gesture, eyeing them both warily. "Wait!" she said. "If you strike at me, you'll have spent too much of your conjured power to make the crossing."

Loki's teeth gnashed audibly. Thor gripped him by the shoulder and held him. "What do you seek, Amora?" he growled. "Asgard lies in mortal peril -- "

"Asgard is _my_ home as well, Thunderer!" she said. "We come to aid in the battle, if you will take us thence, and leave our own quarrel in abeyance til it be done."

"After what you did, you _dare_ \-- " Loki began, his voice rising almost shrill, but Thor shook him and said to Amora, "Your aid is welcome, Enchantress, and yours, Executioner; and if given will clear all debts between us."

" _What?_ " Loki said, wheeling on him. "You would _pardon_ her for what she did to us?"

"Brother, we cannot fight alongside allies who must fear for their own backs," Thor said. Then he frowned and said, "And what of all your mirth! You mocked my distress, and said I was a fool, that we were not even blood kin -- "

"Oh, shut up," Loki said savagely. He threw a look of utter hatred at Amora; Tony wouldn't have bet a whole lot on the safety of her back anywhere in Loki's range, no matter what Thor said, and from the way she swallowed and edged back a little towards Skurge, she wouldn't have either.

"You are generous, Thor Odinson," she said, "and I -- I am ashamed I hid in fear from your justice, and did not make you the apologies I owed. But I swear to you now, I did not intend what occurred. The spell I cast ought not have acted in such a fashion."

"Uh, so what _was_ it meant to do?" Tony said.

She looked evasive, and Loki's eyes narrowed. "We'll have the answer to that," he said, "before we go: and you'll put truth spell on yourself first, witch. Or there's no bargain that clears my vow to render your bones into milk."

She paused and said defiantly, "If you wish," and threw up a sort of faint purple haze over her body, before she said, "It was the spell of Mira-Thaniol -- "

"It was _not!_ " Loki roared.

"It _was!_ " she said. "I meant it to make Thor seek congress with _me_ \-- "

"Amora!" Thor said, blushing pink.

" -- that I might bear an heir for Asgard who was not _such a fool_ as the two of you!" she finished.

"Oh yeah," Bruce said into the resulting awkward silence, "I can see you're completely qualified to raise a well-adjusted child."

"I can scarcely do much _worse_ than the Allfather," Amora said, "with one son trying to be kinslayer and the other playing toy soldiers, both rutting about on a mortal backwater, and let me take off truth spell now!"

"You're _lying_ ," Loki said.

"I am under truth spell!" she said.

"I'm still unclear, what does this Midol thing _do?_ " Tony said.

"It makes you seek pleasure with the one nearby whom destiny best fits for your bed," Amora said. "I was sure it would be me! I had made a great working of fertility, I would have surely conceived a most powerful child -- "

"To turn into a weapon in your hands!" Thor said, looking utterly horrified. "Hear me, Amora: you will never do such a thing again. And if ever I should be enchanted into lying with you, you will be put under watch, and if you _should_ bear me a child, I will take it from you and into my own house; I will not suffer any child of mine to be raised for any purpose but love."

"You are a selfish, irresponsible, brawling idiot who thinks nothing of the good of Asgard or your people, and it will be an utter disaster if ever you come to the throne!" Amora told him. " _Please_ may I take off truth spell?"

Thor looked hurt. Loki had an odd expression on his face staring at Amora. "You have courted Thor for centuries," he said to her. "How long have you thought this?"

"Since he was a boy!" Amora said. "All of us think so, everyone of the great houses. _You_ were our only hope, for at least you had wit to go with your malice; and then you went mad and vicious and we learned you were a Jotun foundling. Now we have nothing, no worthy heir to the throne, and all Asgard's fate hangs upon Odin's weakening breath!"

She stopped, panting, and Natasha said, "Take off the truth spell."

" _Thank_ you," Amora said, and the purple haze vanished.

Thor was red-faced and wordlessly spluttering like his brain was on a rotation from stunned to indignant and back. Loki glared at Natasha. "I was not _done_ \-- "

"There's a war waiting," Natasha said, meeting his look squarely, even though she had to stiffen her shoulders to do it. "You got the answer. The rest isn't important. One person's gossip isn't intel."

Loki was silent, and then he said savagely, "Make ready then, all of you," and swept to the leading edge of the terrace.

"What was that about?" Tony muttered to Natasha, as they took hands; there was some hasty jockeying going on since no one really wanted to hold hands with Amora and Skurge. "Since when is gossip not intel?"

"One person's gossip is just random noise," Natasha said. "Ten people's gossip is intel." She glanced at Tony and her eyes narrowed. "I'm not coming along to stick knives in some more Chitauri, Stark. This is our first opportunity to learn anything about Asgard."

"Right, obviously," Tony said.

#

They staggered back to Earth three weeks later. The week after that was spent mostly lying around at angles between 160 and 180 degrees on any available surface. Even the Hulk was tired.

Clint had actually been their team MVP, after Thor: Frigga had given him a bow out of the treasury to use that never ran out of magic arrows, and he'd taken out nearly a full legion on his own. He and Natasha vanished into her bedroom about five minutes after coming back. Tony idly asked Jarvis for a peek, mostly for the opportunity to be obnoxious about it later, but they'd hacked the camera feed and rickrolled him with a video of him and Steve and Bruce from Sheep Meadow. It was a good edit, though, so Tony watched it for a while.

Thor and Loki had colonized the giant couches in the living room. Thor snored steadily on with Mjolnir cuddled up to his chest like a teddy bear. Loki woke up every so often demanding coffee and cold compresses for his head and whined so much if he didn't get them that Tony finally had Dummy move up to the living room to rotate the mugs and icepacks back and forth.

"It's okay if you accidentally spill something on him," Tony told Dummy, except the first time the wobbly coffeepot headed out, without opening his eyes Loki said, "If you drop that on me, mechanical arm, I will transmute you into a jellyfish and throw you off the terrace." Dummy miraculously became perfectly efficient.

When he wasn't being harassed by his asshole-god houseguest, Tony stayed in his lab and drank a lot. He was feeling pretty depressed. Granted, they had won two intergalactic wars in succession and Odin -- _the_ Odin -- had called them guest-friends of Asgard, which was supposedly a big deal. But Tony already got invited to a lot of parties, and he'd brought home forty terabytes of data he literally wasn't going to be able to understand within the remainder of his lifespan. He was trying to decide whether it made sense to cancel all other projects and work nonstop on life extension until he nailed that.

Pepper let him have through the end of the week to sulk before she appeared. "Okay, time's up," she said. When she tried and failed to pry the vodka out of his hand, she went and got Steve up from his own nap.

"You don't understand," Tony said, as he was dragged away from his liquor and his computers and his data, his _data_ \-- "If I work on this for every minute from now until I'm one hundred and eight I still won't have gotten through more than half -- "

"There is that small problem with how you'd fall over and die a lot sooner than that, Tony?" Pepper said. She was leading the way, opening the doors.

"I have some thoughts about that," Tony started saying, then spluttered as Steve shoved him into the shower; Pepper had already turned the water on. Steve dragged off Tony's clothes even as they soaked through. "What, I don't even get dinner and a movie?" Tony said, surfacing out of his t-shirt.

Pepper sat down on the toilet lid and crossed her legs and said, "Steve, would you please give him a blowjob?"

Steve darted a wide-eyed look back at her; Pepper smiled at him sunnily and said, "And after that, I think he really needs to be fucked very hard. And then you can have me."

"Oh," Steve said in a slightly strangled voice. Then he went to his knees.

"Yes, thank you, I'm better now," Tony said, resting peacefully against the wall of the shower, watching while Pepper sighed softly for the third time under Steve's mouth. He was being an idiot. The point wasn't to understand everything. The point was to understand just enough to build something cooler than anything the Asgardians had. Tony could do that. Ten years, tops. "Want to get something to eat?" he added, as they finished up.

"Yes," Steve said, emphatically. They swung by the lab and got Bruce and went out to the Second Avenue Deli and all had chicken matzoh ball soup and brisket and egg creams.

When they got back, Tony noticed the horrifying crowd of worshippers who had collected in a perimeter around the Tower. He'd missed them on the way out because at first glance they seemed just like tourists or commuters: they came, looked around, and left. But no: they were coming, bowing their heads to _pray_ , adding a little something to the giant pile of offerings accumulating outside the lobby, and then leaving.

Upstairs, Thor and Loki were awake and fighting over the remote. Apparently Thor wanted to watch Sex And The City and Loki wanted to watch a nature documentary about wolves eating rabbits. By the time Tony came in, Thor had made the mistake of pinning Loki down on the floor with his full body weight, and they were now frozen with fixed expressions that were suggesting they were not at all even a little thinking about that time they'd had sex.

"Sorry to interrupt the kinky and vaguely incestuous wrestling," Tony said, "but Thor, can you please do something about your cult now?"

Thor jumped up off Loki like he'd been scalded. "I will address them!" he announced, and fled. That backfired: when Thor showed up, the crowd immediately swelled to ten times the size, locked up all of Midtown, and the louder Thor got telling them to go to their homes and return to their own gods, the louder everyone cheered and ignored him. The broadcast started running on every single channel worldwide.

Loki watched it all with his arms folded and rolled his eyes. "Hey," Tony said to him, "you're supposed to help with this, right?"

"Oh, yes," Loki said. "I'll help."

Loki's idea of helping turned out to be making Thor look completely ridiculous to the largest number of people possible at any one time. It started with little things, pigeons happening to shit on him and dogs taking a leak on his leg, and then it built into seriously committed Rube Goldbergian arrangements like the beautifully orchestrated intersection of the Cirque du Soleil trailers, a large commercial oil tanker, a flock of Canadian geese, and a troop of first-graders at a Mr. Softee truck. The first-graders ended up as the wide-eyed live audience as Thor smashed into the ground in front of them, dazed and with half his beard on fire, covered with spangles and feathers, a smear of bright pink makeup across his mouth and another smear of yellow across his right eye, and a pretentious soundtrack playing in harmony with the ice cream truck's jingle.

Thor sat wobbly up out of the shallow crater in front of them. The little kids looked at him and giggled. One of them offered him her ice cream cone out of pity. It all ended up broadcast worldwide by the 24-hour All-Thor All-The-Time channels.

"My beard will be months in growing back!" Thor said angrily, throttling Loki midair with one hand, after he'd gotten back to Stark Tower after that incident.

"You asked for it!" Loki wheezed. "You made me _swear!_ " Then he turned blue -- not from strangling, literally turned bright blue -- and Thor yelped and let go of him with a hand that looked like it'd been hit with frostbite. Loki dropped to the floor and turned back to normal, straightening his clothes fussily while Thor scowled at him, nursing his fingers.

"How did you guys turn this off last time?" Steve asked. "You haven't been worshipped for the last thousand years -- "

"We _left_ ," Loki said. "The Allfather decided we were exerting too much influence over mortal minds, and commanded that we should withdraw from your world. After a few generations, our worshippers began to forget our power, and the cult became just another of your invented religions."

Thor looked deeply unhappy. "If we must go -- " he began, low.

"I am not spending a few generations sharing this planet with a bunch of people who sincerely believe you're God," Tony said. That morning Fox News had called the tower _Thor's_ Tower, which was just not on, in Tony's opinion. "Come on, Loki, you're seriously saying you can't step up your game?"

Loki folded his arms. "Not if my brother holds _his_ oath more cheaply than do I my own, and refuses his cooperation," he said, with oceanic levels of snide.

Thor glared at him. "I will not be forsworn!"

"Well then," Loki said, and the next day Tony wandered into the rec room to find Barton and Steve staring mesmerized (in a horrified kind of way) from behind the couch at the TV, which was set to QVC. Loki was sitting on the couch eating an apple with obvious pleasure.

Thor was on the screen, beard trimmed very short, sitting perched awkwardly on a stool and staring down at his own hands. He had Mjolnir in one, and -- well, another Mjolnir in the other; except the second Mjolnir was made out of plastic and had a light-up buzzer on the top. It was also slightly larger than the real thing.

Joan Rivers was sitting across from him explaining enthusiastically to all the viewers at home that this was the one, the only, the official endorsed and licensed replica -- now available for twelve easy installments of $19.95 apiece --

"Where'd you get the plastic hammers?" Tony said. The camera was doing a close-up of Thor: Joan had just asked him to talk about the realistic heft of the hammer replica and to demonstrate the swinging action -- apparently the buzzer was supposed to go off when you swung hard enough, to represent thunder and lightning. Thor looked like he was debating hitting himself in the head. With one or both of the hammers.

"There was a dealer on the street outside selling them to the worshippers for five dollars," Loki said, munching. "He connected me to his suppliers."

On the screen, Thor unenthusiastically swung the replica hammer. It didn't light up.

"Oh, you didn't get it to light up!" Joan crowed. "Go on, try again. Come on, am I going to have to get a six year old in here to show the God of Thunder how it's done?"

After the plastic hammers, they moved on to commemorative plates painted with Thor's face and a surrounding border of sad-faced kittens -- eyes a matching shade of blue to Thor's. Tony averted his eyes for that segment; some things were too horrible to be enjoyed even ironically. After that came jewelry. Tony's favorite was a tiny little gold-electroplated hammer charm, which could be added to your Thor charm bracelet, along with a lightning-bolt charm, a charm that was a helmet with wings -- Tony raised an inquiring eyebrow at Loki, who just smirked; Thor was scowling at the charm very hard -- and a bigger one of a chariot being pulled by goats. Joan made Thor hold up the charm bracelet in front of his unsmiling face and model it on his own wrist.

Thor stormed back into the tower that night red with indignation, bracelet in his fist with the little hammer dangling. "I do not see how this will serve to undermine my worship!" Thor said. "As I came home I witnessed thousands waving the false Mjolnir in the air as I passed!"

"Just wait until they all start breaking in a week," Loki said, "and they try to use the return and exchange policy."

"And what of _this_?" Thor brandished the bracelet. "Why do you force me to sell these cheap and unworthy trinkets? These are not even made truly of gold, nor even of metal!" He crushed it in one fist and displayed the dull grey interiors.

"You don't like it?" Loki said, affecting a wounded tone. "I thought the helmet one had a certain -- charm."

He laughed at his own pun while Thor glared. "There is worship of _you_ as well!" he said. "Why do _you_ not sell charms of your own?"

"Why, brother," Loki said, "I didn't want you to feel as though you had to compete with me."

"I am well able to withstand your competition," Thor said, grabbing Loki by the collar. "Tomorrow you will join me on this QVC."

It turned out, unfortunately, that Thor couldn't actually withstand Loki's competition, at least not when it came to television shopping. While Thor kept trying to get the fake hammer to light up, Loki enthusiastically displayed his helmet replica, flirted with Joan and made several innuendo-laden remarks about the size of the horns, and demonstrated how you could chain together twenty of _his_ charm bracelets into a wristband for that extra-special fashion statement. By the afternoon, Loki somehow got QVC to display their respective running sales totals on the screen, and it was just embarrassing.

On the second day, he added a new feature where he read letters from fans out loud and answered them in sultry tones while looking directly into the camera with a smoldering gaze. The totals got even more lopsided.

On the third day, Loki said, "Brother, perhaps I might help you with that," and took the fake hammer out of Thor's hand. Thor still hadn't been able to get it to light up. Loki gave it one good swish and the buzzer blared excitedly on the screen; in the rec room, Tony and Clint covered their ears, wincing.

Thor grabbed it back, indignantly. "Why will it not light for me?" he demanded. "Have you been using your sorcery to prevent it?"

"Really, Thor," Loki said. "I was trying to help, that's not very kind of you. Maybe you're just not worthy."

Thor threw the hammer at Loki's head. Loki ducked. The hammer smashed into the towering display of the Official Thor Halloween Costume, complete with polyester cape and a plastic breastplate that looked like it had been specially sculpted to accommodate the largest manboobs ever. The costume tipped over with a crash into the rest of Thor's side of the studio. "Temper, temper," Loki said, tsking.

"Gnrraaaargh!" Thor said. Something like that, anyway. He leaped at Loki, who made a break for it. They vanished off the screen, leaving Joan alone with the helmet replica in one hand, another hammer in the other, and a half-destroyed stage. Joan looked at the camera and then put the helmet on. "Hey!" she said. "Do I make a great goddess or what?" She swung the hammer. It buzzed.

"Sir," Jarvis said, shortly thereafter, "Director Fury would like the Avengers scrambled at once."

"What?" Tony said. "What happened now?"

"Thor and Loki seem to be causing some difficulties on the West Side," Jarvis said.

Thor was chasing Loki across the river, yelling and hurling thunderbolts. Loki was dodging and laughing his head off. As Tony flew into view, Thor had just taken out one of the Manhattan Mini Storage billboards -- _REMEMBER, IF YOU LEAVE THE CITY, YOU'LL HAVE TO LIVE IN AMERICA._ Loki was taunting his aim as he dodged Mjolnir throws -- the real Mjolnir -- but then Thor tore off the netting from the Chelsea Piers trapeze and managed to catch Loki in it and swing him around.

"Hey!" Tony yelled. "Hey! Aim for Jersey!" and Thor slingshotted Loki straight into the Hudson with a giant splash and a gurgling yelp.

Tony hovered, not quite directly over the river: he was pretty sure he didn't want to be in the line of fire when Loki came back out. Thor had landed on the bank and was glaring down at the fading ripples, Mjolnir held ready. The Quinjet was coming too, circling around: Clint hanging out the side and Natasha at the controls; Bruce was peering out over Clint's shoulder.

"Anybody feel like coming up with a god-control plan here?" Tony asked over the comlink, as the jet pulled up near him a few minutes later.

"How long has he been down there?" Bruce said.

"Five minutes," Natasha said.

"Well, this is probably going to be messy," Bruce said.

"I think we should -- " Steve started, but whatever he'd been going to say was cut off as Loki finally exploded out of the water, riding what appeared to be a mass of frogs and fish and turtles encased in the netting.

"Huh," Tony said. "There are fish in the Hudson?" To be fair, when he zoomed in several of the fish seemed to have three or more eyes and there was at least one turtle in the mix with neon red stripes on its shell.

Thor had about three seconds to widen his eyes before Loki dumped the entire mass of wriggling aquatic denizens on him. The avalanche knocked him off into the water, and he came up spluttering with a five-legged frog on his head. "I will _glub glub glub_!" Thor yelled at Loki, waving a fist, which was turning into a scaled flippery thing as he waved it: his eyes were blobbing out and his mouth was --

"Did he just -- " Bruce said, after a moment. A long, silent moment.

"Yep," Tony said. "Thor is now a frog."

Thor noticed he was a frog at about the same time. His eyes -- big, blue, and watery -- bugged out even more. " _Glub glub gluuuuub!"_ he yelled at Loki, who was now standing on the pier, dripping wet and cackling.

"What's that, brother?" Loki shouted back. "I couldn't quite catch the nuances of your new tongue -- "

Thor jumped at him from out of the water. It turned out a Thor-sized frog could make a very impressive jump.

"...ow," Loki wheezed, flattened under seven feet of angry, hammer-wielding frog. Then proving Loki just didn't know when to quit, he looked up at Thor and started laughing again.

" _Glub gluuub glurble gradnge grarble gbalr glorb glill ghave --_ your head!" Thor's gurgle gradually turned into words.

"Oh but come!" Loki said. "Surely not until your loving and worshipful followers have seen the mighty Frog of Thunder -- "

Thor smashed Mjolnir down. Loki just managed to squirm out of the way in time. "Well, shit," Tony said, watching the giant crack travel all the way along the pier, heading east. "There goes the West Side Highway."

Loki had gotten loose and was running away again across taxicab roofs, slightly hampered by hysterical laughter and possibly several broken ribs. To make up for that, he was using some kind of teleporting magic to hopscotch himself forward about ten times as far as he jumped. Thor was leaping after him in giant bounding arcs. "You know, no one ever told me there were going to be days like this," Steve said, dropping out of the Quinjet and landing on the roof of Chelsea Piers.

"Really?" Tony said. "I'm pretty sure I remember the giant frog clause in the fine print on section 19.1 of _my_ contract." He swung by and gave Steve a princess lift as they followed Thor and Loki uptown.

They ended up back in Central Park. Tony and Steve lost sight of them around Strawberry Fields and had a few anxious minutes until Tony overheard a tourist on the shore of the lake saying, "Come on, Alice honey, he seemed pretty busy. We'll get a picture with one of the Thors at Bethesda Fountain instead, or the Statue of Liberty lady, how about that?"

Alice, clearly a truly charming six-year-old, opened her mouth and wailed, "I want _Frog_ Thor!"

The Boathouse bar was full of people having drinks, all of them too cool to acknowledge that they'd just seen a seven-foot frog leaping by, but one of the waitresses was from Ohio and had just started that day and hadn't yet absorbed the necessary amount of ennui and cynicism; she pointed them towards Bethesda Fountain. "Man, I hope they don't take out the bandshell again," Steve said, wincing.

They found Thor leaping furiously around the lake, yelling, "Brother, show yourself!" Loki had apparently managed to hide somewhere, which was looking like a good survival strategy on his part. Thor glared at them when they appeared -- fairly alarming coming out of the bulging eyes. "Stark! Use your mechanical eyes. Where is my brother hiding?"

"Listen, Thor," Tony said, "I hate to interrupt your family time, but Janet Pym is on the board of the Central Park Conservancy and I don't want to have another one of those phone calls. How about you and Loki put away the hammer and the magic and -- "

Thor made an inarticulate gargling sound. "Look out -- " Steve said, too late: the whole world was tumbling around them, going green and murky, and Tony was still thrashing around in the water when Thor hauled him back up out of the lake with one sticky-fingered hand to face him.

"Look upon me!" Thor bellowed at him.

"I'm looking," Tony said. It was hard to avoid, he was about six inches away from a giant talking frog. Yelling frog.

"You see what Loki has done! And you would have me pardon him without his due comeuppance?" Thor said.

"I'm just saying, I don't think the city can afford another liability suit," Tony said.

"Thor!" Steve said, slogging towards them. The water was only up to his chest. "You're endangering civilians. This stops now. You want to have it out with Loki, the two of you can take your fight out to the middle of nowhere, a desert or a -- "

"I don't think the desert would be a good idea for Thor right now," Tony said. He tried to resist. He really really tried. "He might -- croak."

"Glarrghg!" Thor said.

"Tony!" Steve said.

On the edge of the lake a bush twitched. Just a tiny twitch, but after all, Thor _was_ a god. He dropped Tony back into the lake and leaped. Leaves and twigs and a couple of wrens and a rat and a piece of a Poland Spring bottle label went flying. "Augh," Loki gasped, driven about a foot into the mud.

"You will restore me to myself, now!" Thor gurgled, his wide mouth clapping, dragging Loki up with big webbed fingers. He punctuated the sentence with additional exclamation points and shaking Loki back and forth.

Loki was still snort-laughing even though he was completely covered in mud and being violently whiplashed. "Come, brother," he managed, "surely you remember your lore? All it takes to restore frog to prince is true love's kiss."

Thor's eyes bulged even more.

"Well," Loki amended, "as much of a prince as he ever was. I'm sure if you only call your mortal lady, she'll be delighted to oblige -- " He pursed his lips and made kissy noises at Thor.

"Maybe he really does have a death wish?" Tony asked Steve idly.

Thor made a bellowing kind of gargle and promptly shot out a giant, incredibly long, sticky-glistening white tongue and nailed Loki right in the mouth. Then he closed in. Loki made a completely muffled and yet thoroughly audible shriek.

There was a blinding flash of light. Then Thor, back to himself again, dropped Loki and Mjolnir both into the muck and felt all over his own face with a look of immense relief. Loki was wiping frantically at his mouth, which was covered with slime, and spitting. "What is _wrong_ with you!" Loki howled at Thor.

"Yes," Steve said to Tony.

"Me!" Thor roared. Mjolnir leaped back into his hand, and he grabbed Loki by the front of his armor. Loki didn't actually try to get away this time, though; he just went with the pull and shoved Thor back a pace, looking furious.

"Why would you even think to _try_ such a thing!" Loki snarled.

"You said this very moment that all I required was true love's kiss!" Thor said.

"So you kissed _me?_ " Loki said, and punched him in the face. Since Thor was still hanging on to him, when Thor went over backward into more mud, Loki went with him. Mud flew everywhere.

Thor threw Loki off him, wiped mud from his face and staggered up to his knees to loom over him. "Of course I kissed you!" Then he punched Loki in the face again. Loki jerked aside from the second punch, and Thor overbalanced and went down into the mud. Loki heaved a leg over his waist, straddled him, and throttled Thor with both hands.

"We are _not_ destined!" Loki yelled down at him while trying to submerge Thor's head in the mud. "I do _not_ love you!"

Thor grabbed Loki and wrestled him down, dragging himself squelchingly up out of the mud. "You _do!_ " Thor said. "Else your spell would not have broken!" He paused, as though he'd just heard himself, and his face started to change like the sun rising.

"I cast it wrong!" Loki said. "I forgot to -- stop it! Stop it, _damn_ you!" Thor was staring down at Loki. Loki snarled and grabbed two fistfuls of mud and tried to shove them into Thor's face. Thor caught him by the wrists and held him pinned. "Let _go!_ " Loki said, and tried to squirm free.

Thor looked a combination of helpless and irritated, and then he blinked and said tentatively, "You will not make me beg?"

"I don't _care_ if you beg!" Loki hissed at him, and then he stopped his squirming abruptly and stared up at Thor.

"Do you not wish to make me beg you again?" Thor said, hopefully. "As before, when you -- "

Loki started lunging frantically against Thor's grip. The mud made him slippery, and Thor lost his hold. Loki tackled him over backwards in the mud and started yanking at Thor's armor.

"I will not!" Thor said urgently, eagerly, tossing away his own breastplate. It landed off in the lake with a splash. "I will _not_ beg you again, Loki -- "

"Oh, you _will_ ," Loki said, panting, opening his own belt, dragging it loose. "I will make you _howl_ my name, brother," he promised. "I will make you _weep_ \-- "

#

"Please," Thor said, sobbing. "Loki, brother, _please_ \-- _please_ \-- " His face was streaked with mud and bits of grass blades, showing the smeary tear-tracks. His arms were shoved most of the way into the dirt, folded to pillow his head, and his knees were spread wide and braced as his hips swayed urgently back and forth.

"Please _what?_ " Loki said, except it didn't sound nearly as vicious as it had six days ago; it came out a low loving purr, coaxing, and he was kissing Thor's back between his shoulderblades, licking sweat tenderly from his skin.

"Please, take me," Thor said, gulping. "Please, brother, take me again -- again, take me wholly -- " He sounded _desperate_.

"Oh, Thor," Loki said, nuzzling him. "Hasn't it been enough? Haven't you yielded everything to me already, over and over?"

"No," Thor said. "No, Loki, I beg you."

Loki leaned forward and said softly, "Would you like me to enthrain you truly?"

Thor made a shrill noise and said, " _Yes_. Yes, Loki, _yes, please_ \-- " and tried to writhe under him in what looked like it was meant to be an inviting way.

"Shh, hush," Loki said. "I will, I promise, hush -- " He was nuzzling Thor some more. "Come, here; I want you comfortable -- "

"Huh," Tony said, eating some more popcorn. "Jarvis, what is he doing?"

Loki was easing Thor down onto his side, without ever sliding his cock out, and snuggling up behind him, tucking his legs behind Thor's. It was somehow even more intimate than all the fucking had been. Thor's cock was huge but limp against his thigh; it seemed to have given up two days ago. As far as Tony could tell, that wasn't stopping Thor from coming his brains out on a roughly hourly basis, his dick just wasn't bothering to keep standing up to do it.

"I'm afraid I can't tell you, sir," Jarvis said. "From connotations, I would have suspected impregnation, but according to your data from Thor, that doesn't seem to be likely."

Loki had his fingers tangled in Thor's hair and was pulling his head back against his shoulder, kissing his neck and cheek and biting his ear. "Are you sure, brother?" he said. "Are you very sure?"

"Yes," Thor said, utterly unhesitating.

"Maybe we should do something?" Bruce said doubtfully. Tony shrugged and held him out the bowl of popcorn. It was them, Natasha, and Pepper: Clint was probably somewhere perched on the roof pretending he wasn't watching the whole thing through a million people's windows, and Steve was in his bedroom with his pillow over his head pretending it wasn't happening at all.

"It's working out so far," Tony said. Apparently the live sex tape had been the last thing the world as a whole had really needed to firmly move Thor and Loki out of the category of _deity_ and into the category of _celebrity_.

Granted, it was a special level of celebrity, but Tony could live with that. Particularly as Stark TV had gotten exclusive footage of the first half-hour and had used that to establish a commanding lead in the ratings before everyone else realized that Loki was in fact letting them get away with broadcasting this time around. The FCC had woken up somewhere on the second day and started smacking down most of the broadcasts, but fortunately Stark TV was paid cable and Tony had all the lawyers in the world in Washington all talking as fast as they possibly could, so for the moment they were still going strong.

Thor was moaning happily on the screen as Loki ran his hand all over his chest, gently handled his limp cock, squeezed his balls. Tony sighed appreciatively: the details really stood out on the new XHD screen he'd designed three days ago, Loki's long fingers cradling Thor from underneath. Loki eased Thor's leg up and drew his own cock out. The knot was down at the moment, though the teeth were still visible -- the occasional shots of Loki's cock did cause a blip in the ratings every time, even though Tony couldn't help a nostalgic squirm personally.

"Are you ready then?" Loki said, gently, sliding his fingers into Thor's ass -- wait, he was adding more oil.

"Uh," Bruce said, "I really think maybe we should -- "

"Yes," Thor said, rocking his hips against Loki's hand. "Yes, Loki, please, I would have you, I would you took me utterly -- "

Loki nodded and drew Thor's head back and kissed him, long and lovingly, and said, "Very well," and then he put his hand on his own cock, and stroked down it, and two more rings of teeth opened along its length as it slowly, terribly, stretched.

"Oh my God," Tony said, because that wasn't a cock anymore, that was a -- a _tentacle monster_ , Jesus --

Pepper had given a small squeak of horror; she punched him. "You put that _in_ you!" she said.

"Don't think I'm not absolutely appalled by that at this particular moment," Tony said faintly.

The teeth nearest the top were stretching out long and thin, turning into silver wriggling lines. They went sliding into Thor, apparently to lead the way. Thor was lying back against Loki and looking up into his face, his eyes heavy-lidded, smiling in a deliriously happy, almost drugged way. He shut his eyes and moaned, still smiling, as the end of Loki's cock squirmed back into him. The next row was pushing in too, alongside, pulling Loki deeper into him. Thor was visibly relaxing in Loki's arms, like his whole body was going limp and heavy.

"Ah," Thor said. "Ah, Loki, yes. _Yes_."

Loki's eyes were half-lidded too; a slow startled smile was half-trembling on his mouth, and it wasn't even ironic. "Oh," he said softly. " _Oh._ "

His cock was squirming even deeper in, looking almost alive and humping its way inside. It looked impossibly huge: Thor's ass was stretched wide around it. The final ring of teeth around the base didn't push inside with the rest: instead they began to stretch out and latch on to Thor's balls. Loki reached between Thor's legs and pushed his soft cock down between his legs where they could reach, and Thor cried out as one stretched out even thinner, wriggled into the slit and slid inside.

Loki's cock was all the way in now. Thor was gasping and flushed resting against Loki, his cock and balls trapped in the grip of the thin filaments. They weren't moving, either of them, but Thor started to make small frantic cries of pleasure, trembling in waves, his whole body arching back. Loki shut his eyes and pressed his forehead against Thor's shoulder, then slid his arms around Thor's shoulders and locked them back against his body, and curled a leg over his hips.

"Thor," Loki hissed very very softly, and then he braced himself, holding tight. Tony couldn't see what he did next, but Thor _screamed_.

He kept screaming, his whole body straining against Loki's grip, almost breaking loose. There was thunder rolling outside the windows, and Tony dragged his eyes away from the screen to see a monstrous pillar of iron-black clouds reaching down from the sky towards Central Park, limned in glowing green light. Before he could react, the tv screen blacked out and went dark as a massive forked pillar of lightning cracked down outside through the clouds with a sound like a hundred-megaton blast.

Steve skidded into the room a minute later, in sock feet and pale. "What the hell was that?" he said. The thunderstorm was already dispersing.

"That," Tony said, "was the sound of a god coming his brains out."

Fifteen minutes later, they were still arguing over who was going to head down to Central Park and make sure that nobody had died, when Thor unexpectedly slammed down on the terrace and staggered inside. They all stared at him: Tony had no idea how he was still moving. He was still naked, although it took a minute to be sure of that under the half-inch of mud, and he was smoking faintly. Loki was slung over his shoulder, completely unconscious. Blessedly, Loki's cock was not visible.

Thor blinked at them all, wobbling. "Nng," he said dazedly, and then disappeared down the hall towards his bedroom. There was no comforting slam.

Tony tried to argue that they should draw straws to see who was going to go close the door, but everyone pulled the bullshit argument that it was _his_ house. He looked at Pepper -- _their_ house? Pepper raised an eyebrow. "You go close the door eighty-eight percent of the way and I'll take care of the rest."

"That just keeps coming back to bite me," Tony muttered, and went. Thor had dumped Loki on the bed and fallen down next to him. Tony tried not to look, but Loki was sprawled on his back and his tentacle monster hadn't finished shrinking down yet. Thor was cuddled up to his side and snuggling him possessively. They were both smiling blissfully.

Tony pulled the door shut as fast as he could.

#

They didn't come out for a week. Loki eventually showed up one morning and made Tony scream like a preschooler and pour his own coffee all over himself: he'd turned around and found Loki behind his back, naked, staring at him glassy-eyed and reaching out a hand.

Tony flung himself to the ground to escape and got halfway across the room scrambling before he realized that Loki had actually been reaching for the coffee, half of which was already down his throat. His cock was hanging soft between his legs, looking _absolutely normal_.

"In my defense," Tony said to Bruce, clinging -- Bruce had come down the hall from R&D to see what had made Tony shriek -- "In my defense -- " He'd already come up with several extremely cogent arguments for persuading Loki to give him another shot. He couldn't help it, his brain just _did_ this kind of thing --

Bruce patted Tony on the shoulder. "It's okay, Tony," he said. "We were going to tell you tonight: we decided we're taking away your cards."

"Oh, thank God," Tony said. "But, wait -- "

"Pepper, Steve, me, and Rhodey if you ever talk him into it," Bruce said firmly. "You're just going to have to live with that."

" _No_ cards?" Tony said, a little plaintively. "At all?"

"Tony," Bruce said. "If you ever got another card, what would you do with it?"

"Yes, fine, granted," Tony said. He peered over Bruce's shoulder one last simultaneously wistful and horrified time. Loki had finished the pot and was now staring into it suspiciously like he was trying to figure out what had happened to stop the flow of coffee. "We'd better help him make another before he kills the coffeepot for disobedience."

It turned out to be just as well. Thor came bounding out two days later right after dawn, also naked but showered squeaky-clean and looking somehow golden and even _fluffy_. "Did you use Pepper's conditioner again?" Tony said, squinting at him blearily from over his mug of hot milk.

He was about to head to bed himself: he'd spent the night bashing out the draft schematics for the first CTA -- Cooler Than Asgard -- transport vehicle, which when he was done would take you between dimensions _and_ have a reclining mode so you could have sex under the transparent roof while joyriding with the universe streaming by. It would have less raw power, but it would make the Bifrost look like a moving truck next to a Maserati. Tony was already counting the days until he could very casually show it off to Thor.

"No," Thor said cheerfully. "I have been enthrained. Where is my brother?" He looked around.

"He's on the terrace," Tony said: Loki had parked himself on one of the chaise longues after getting up and hadn't moved since except to take more coffee if anyone brought some out to him, which they occasionally did on the theory it would keep him from coming back inside and bringing along his terrifying cock. "You okay?"

"I am exceedingly well, I thank you," Thor said. "I did not understand how it would be, to be enthrained, else I would surely have made Loki mine long ago. There is a great deal of false gossip on the matter in Asgard," he added, sounding mildly outraged, "which makes it out a dreadful and terrifying experience, which none would willingly endure."

"Right, I can't imagine why," Tony said. "Thor?"

"Yes?" Thor said, stopping at the terrace door.

"Does this mean the two of you are -- " Tony paused. "What are you now?"

"Brothers?" Thor said, puzzled. "You know this, Stark."

"Right, but -- look, what's the enthraining thing?" Tony said.

"Ah." Thor blushed a little. "When -- when now I sire a child," he said, "they will -- partake in an equal share of my brother's nature, as well as my own." He blushed again.

"Wait, seriously?" Tony said. "He bangs you and -- oh my God, what have I done."

Thor's eyes narrowed. "He did _not_ enthrain you!" he said dangerously. "And Stark, be warned now: for the love I bear you and our comradeship in battle, I will forgive your first trespass in this matter, as I had not yet made my claim, but if you ever again attempt to entice Loki to your bed, I will _not_ forgive."

"Right," Tony said, raising his hands hurriedly. "Understood. No enticing. Ever. None. I swear." Thor eyed him a little suspiciously for another moment, and then he nodded and went on bounding out onto the terrace.

Loki cracked an eye to look at Thor with the same expression Tony turned on anyone who tried to wake _him_ up before eleven in the morning, but Thor just yanked on the backrest of the chaise to lay Loki out flat and climbed onto him. The soundproofing didn't pass along the conversation, but Loki visibly got with the program pretty fast from there.

Tony hit the intercom. "Hey, Steve?"

"Yeah?" Steve said, panting; Tony could hear his fists landing on the punching bag.

"It's okay to look but not touch, right?" Tony said.

"Sure?" Steve said.

"Good, good, just checking," Tony said.

"Wait, what are you watching?" Steve said warily.

Thor had his head flung back with a beatific expression on his face and was working himself onto Loki's cock, which was busily cooperating to its horrifyingly full extent. Loki was trying very hard to look disgruntled, but it wasn't working out that well for him; the mask kept slipping and showing naked adoration underneath.

Tony stared out the window another moment, then pulled his eyes away. "You know what, never mind," he said. "I'll be there in two minutes. Give Bruce a call, would you?"

# End

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Entanglements [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3619986) by [tinypinkmouse_podfic (tinypinkmouse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinypinkmouse/pseuds/tinypinkmouse_podfic)




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